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TMPDIR is the canonical environment variable in Unix and POSIX [1] that should be used to specify a temporary directory for scratch space.Most Unix programs will honor this setting and use its value to denote the scratch area for temporary files instead of the common default of /tmp [2] [3] or /var/tmp.
In Unix and Linux, the global temporary directories are /tmp and /var/tmp. Web browsers periodically write data to the tmp directory during page views and downloads. Typically, /var/tmp is for persistent files (as it may be preserved over reboots), and /tmp is for more temporary files. See Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
Process substitution can also be used to capture output that would normally go to a file, and redirect it to the input of a process. The Bash syntax for writing to a process is >(command). Here is an example using the tee, wc and gzip commands that counts the lines in a file with wc -l and compresses it with gzip in one pass:
A temporary file is a file created to store information temporarily, either for a program's intermediate use or for transfer to a permanent file when complete. [1] It may be created by computer programs for a variety of purposes, such as when a program cannot allocate enough memory for its tasks, when the program is working on data bigger than the architecture's address space, or as a ...
They can also be used to store temporary values for reference later in a shell script. However, in Unix, non-exported variables are preferred for this as they do not leak outside the process. In Unix, an environment variable that is changed in a script or compiled program will only affect that process and possibly child processes.
mktemp is a command available in many Unix-like operating systems that creates a temporary file or directory. [1] Originally released in 1997 as part of OpenBSD 2.1, [2] a separate implementation exists as a part of GNU Coreutils. [3] There used to be a similar named C library function, which is now deprecated for being unsafe, and has safer ...
Some Linux distributions (e.g. Debian) do not have a tmpfs mounted on /tmp by default; in this case, files under /tmp will be stored in the same file system as /. And on almost all Linux distributions, a tmpfs is mounted on /run/ or /var/run/ to store temporary run-time files such as PID files and Unix domain sockets.
Named pipes cannot be created as files within a normal filesystem, unlike in Unix. Also unlike their Unix counterparts, named pipes are volatile (removed after the last reference to them is closed). Every pipe is placed in the root directory of the named pipe filesystem (NPFS), mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\ (that is, a pipe named ...